Tag Archives: Architecture

The last time I was in Thunder Bay, I overheard someone say: “For a city in the middle of so much natural beauty, it sure puts up some ugly buildings.” I’m not sure if that’s entirely fair. For one thing, the place has some serious weather. After a long winter, exterior surfaces can start to look worn. While there are brick buildings, especially in the downtown part of Port Arthur, a lot of houses and smaller businesses are wood frame and painted. To my mind, the challenge is maintenance. The local economy struggles, and where businesses go under, buildings get neglected. Thunder Bay is also a university town with a transient student population and large rental market. Landlords may not have a commitment to regular upkeep. That, of course, is just an impression I get as I pass through. I could be dead wrong about the state of affairs in Thunder Bay. Maybe I’m just photographing buildings as a way to confirm my already-held assumptions.

When I hear the word “development” I feel skeptical. Phrases like “structural adjustments” aren’t far behind. I wonder, too, if it isn’t just a case of Western financial institutions trying to make non-Western places over in their own image. When I hear the word “development” in connection with words like “modern” and “modernism” my skepticism turns up a notch.

We might say to a friend: “See the modern-looking building.” But our observation is far from neutral. Modern is not a stylistic quirk or a design decision. It’s an expression of an ideology. It’s a way of being in the world. It assumes the primacy of science, the certainty of progress, the promise of a bright and shining future, the value of democracy, the inevitability of capitalism, the cachet of consumption. Even those of us who turn a critical eye to its assumptions can’t help but note that we ourselves are moderns. We were born into it. We have internalized its values. As a result, we catch ourselves speaking out of both sides of our mouths. We fret for the environment but drift into malls and buy things we know will end up buried in landfill. We point a finger at late capitalism’s unjust distribution of wealth yet run out to play our lottery numbers.

Like all large cities suckling at the teat of late capitalism, it looks like Singapore has thrown its official plan into the shredder. Large construction projects have sprung up everywhere. The demand for cheap foreign labour goes up and up even as local citizenship requirements become more stringent. There’s a whiff of payola in the air. Dirty money in need of laundering. I’m no forensic accountant, but when every mall has a Rolex store, I get the feeling something is strange with the local economy.

Ceiling of The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

Take the Marina Bay Sands – hotel, world’s largest atrium casino, convention centre, museum, theatres, shopping mall, 7 celebrity chef restaurants, infinity pool, skating rink, indoor river with gondoliers. With an $8bn price tag, it’s touted as the world’s most expensive standalone casino property. It all seems a bit grandiose. More to the point, it all seems a bit beyond ordinary people. The scale of its buildings reinforces that feeling. This is a place better suited for giants.

Supertrees and Flower Dome, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore

Within sight of Marina Bay Sands are the Gardens by the Bay which includes the conservatories. Shown above is the Flower Dome, the world’s largest columnless glasshouse. You get the impression that Singapore doesn’t mess around. It wants the biggest of this and the best of that.

Marina Bay Sands Hotel viewed from the Flower Dome, Singapore

I’m fascinated by the municipal fetish for waterfront ferris wheels. London has the Eye. Hong Kong has its prosaically named Observation Wheel. Singapore has the Flyer. Toronto’s former mayor, the illustrious Rob Ford, wanted Toronto to have a giant ferris wheel, too, reasoning that we couldn’t be a “world class” city without one. The city dismissed his proposal as the whimsical product of a sad man-child’s immature brain. One wonders if the city would have reacted differently had the proposal come from Toronto’s current and sober mayor.

View of Singapore Flyer, ArtScience Museum, and Double Helix Bridge

Path alongside the Flower Dome, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore

One of the problems with modern architecture – or modern anything for that matter – is that it plays to the future at the expense of the past. Old buildings are obsolete or inefficient. Historical concerns and cultural significance get in the way.

The Concourse business tower viewed over the tiled roofs of Arab Town, Singapore.

Early on the morning of January 4th, my wife woke me with the news that there was a fire on Jarvis south of Carlton if I felt like getting up for some good photos. It was -15 degrees, dark outside, and I was tired, so I fell back to sleep. As is typical, I kicked myself afterwards for my lack of motivation. Now, all you can see of the site is the burnt out peak of the roof and a plywood fence to keep people out.

The building is 150 years old, an example of Beaux Art classicism (so says a Toronto Star article), and is designated a heritage building (which means it’s an impediment to further development). There’s no info as to the cause of the fire. It should be noted that the building was unoccupied and no one was injured.

Fortunately for me, I did have enough motivation to get to the site before the boards went up. It was still cold and a lot of the water that had been sprayed on the building had stayed behind to decorate the mayhem.

Naturally, there was a security guard posted to keep the gawkers out. He followed me around. I assumed that he assumed that I was going to try to sneak into the building for some interior shots, so I thought I better say something to assure him I’m not stupid. I should know better than to assume anything of anyone. Before I had two words out of my mouth, he asked me a gear question.

“Oh, so you’re a photographer too?”

“Yeah, I’m a bit of an addict,” he said. It turns out he wasn’t worried that I might do something; he was curious to know how I was seeing, how I was framing things, what I was shooting. Then he pointed me to the other side of the building. I might find the ice there kind of interesting. I thanked him and went where he pointed while he went back to his car to stay warm.

Us photographers, we’re like a secret society. We have a handshake and everything.

When I moved into my current home (on the 15th floor of a condo), it was with the understanding that I would be moving into construction. The condo corporation had just contracted to replace all the windows and repair the building envelope. (Until I moved here, I had no idea that buildings have envelopes.) No sooner had I settled into my new space than a truck arrived and men started hauling metal poles out of the back. In short order, they’d put up scaffolding along the front of the building.

Man wearing “scaffolding” shirt on Avenue Road in Yorkville, Toronto

Although scaffolding sites are temporary, and shift dynamically across the face of the city, the fact of scaffolding itself is a permanent feature of modern city life. Forgive the oxymoron, but scaffolding is an ephemeral permanency. There’s always a new project underway, and always a demand for temporary struts to support it, or to protect passers-by on the sidewalk below. Once the structure is complete, the metal bars and stagings disappear, only to pop up somewhere else.

Scaffolding at construction site, Queen’s Quay, Toronto

In documenting city life, I would be remiss if I didn’t allow scaffolding to creep into some of my photographs. In a way, my documentary obsession is a kind of scaffolding. I hold in mind a blueprint of the city. Call it a Platonic ideal if you like. It aspires to completeness: a whole vision: the city’s deepest truth. One day I’ll publish a photobook about the city, and implicit in its publication will be the claim that I’m presenting the city as it really is. That claim is a fiction, of course. I’m not omniscient; I don’t have a godlike perch from which to survey everything simultaneously, from the Rouge to the Humber, and from the lake shore north. I offer a sampling of what I see and, for a brief time, like metal rods and stagings, it props up a larger vision which can’t yet reveal itself.

You wouldn’t think a solid grounding in calculus could make someone rich, but in the case of mathematician, James Stewart, his textbooks for high school and university students made him rich beyond imagining. Looking for something to do with his money, he purchased a property (194 Roxborough Drive) in the heart of Rosedale, leveled the house that was already there, and commissioned the Toronto firm Shim-Sutcliffe Architects to design what the director of MOMA has described as “one of the most important private houses built in North America in a long time.” The result is Integral House.

While in Thunder Bay, I paid a visit to the former Saskatchewan Wheat Pool 4A and 4B elevators on Shipyard Road by the waterfront. I have no idea which elevator is 4A and which is 4B. I went in both and climbed onto the roof of the red one. It’s possible to climb the white one, too, but the owners have removed all the metal landings in the stairwell, which means you have to climb over each railing all the way up. Since I was carrying a backpack full of gear, a camera, and tripod, I opted for the easier climb.

To be clear, the fact that the grain elevators are abandoned doesn’t mean that entering them stops being a trespass. But given that the elevators are visually arresting, trespass seems like a minor matter.

Toronto kicked off the civic holiday weekend by opening the tunnel to Billy Bishop Airport. Passengers no longer have to wait for the ferry when they want to catch a flight from Toronto Island. Heather Mallick’s op-ed in the Toronto Star nicely captures the feel of the place: “The pedestrian lake tunnel at Toronto’s downtown Billy Bishop Airport has finally opened at the cost of annihilating the soul, plus $82.5 million.” She uses adjectives like tedious, stale, drab and dreary and suggests that the materials came from Home Depot. Step into the tunnel and it’s obvious that functionality was top priority. Review the comments below Mallick’s piece and it’s obvious that most Torontonians are happy with functionality. More numinous qualities like spirit, whimsy, or even aesthetics, don’t seem to interest people, so why should we care what the tunnel looks like?

There is an upside to the Tunnel: with the construction completed, people can once again access Ireland Park at the foot of the Canada Malting Silos.

In the park is a limestone wall engraved with the names of those who died in Toronto in 1847 as a consequence of the Great Famine. 1186 people died, mostly of typhus, mostly in anonymity. So far, researchers have learned the names of 675 of the dead.

The park also features bronze sculptures, Migrants, by Irish artist, Rowan Gillespie. The derelict Canada Malting Silos provide a lovely backdrop for the sculptures because, as the new tunnel illustrates, aesthetics matter to people in Toronto.

Photographing buildings in Manhattan is a challenge, or at least it was for me last week, and for two reasons. First, I didn’t have the right gear, only my little mirrorless Fujifilm camera and a pancake lens. Second, even if I had the right gear, buildings in Manhattan have been shot to death. What could I possibly say that’s original or interesting? So I side-stepped the question. Instead of photographing buildings, I photographed people (since I was really there to do street photography anyways) and was mindful of buildings lurking in the background to give the people context. Here are some of the results.

Man sitting on fire hose connection with Flatiron Building in background

The so-called Luminous Veil is, for me, a symbol-laden structure. The Luminous Veil is a late addition to the half kilometre length of Toronto’s Prince Edward Viaduct. It was designed to end the viaduct’s reputation as one of North America’s premiere suicide destinations. Michael Ondaatje has paid homage to the viaduct in his novel, In The Skin Of The Lion, and includes an episode where a construction worker saves a nun from plummeting into the Don Valley below. The viaduct also appears in Bruce Cockburn’s folk song, “Anything Can Happen.” More recently, in “War On Drugs,” The Barenaked Ladies share their thoughts on the upgraded structure:

Near where I live there’s a viaduct
Where people jump when they’re out of luck
Raining down on the cars and trucks below
They’ve put a net there to catch their fall
Like that’ll stop anyone at all
What they don’t know is that when nature calls you go

Although Stephen Page’s lyrics suggest that the Luminous Veil has merely shifted suicides to other bridges, I have heard (from grief counsellors) that it may, in fact, prevent impulsive suicides.